Research news: January 2013

JAMA 2012;308:2208-17

In 2009 general medical interns at two US hospitals had to work one night in four. They began work at 7 am one morning and went home about 1 pm the following day, an overnight shift of roughly 30 hours. They got little sleep during shifts, so researchers conducted trials (one at each hospital) to test a new schedule that gave on-call interns five hours of protected sleep between 12.30 am and 5.30 am. Interns slept about one hour longer during protected nights than they did during control nights (2.86 v 1.98 hours at one hospital and 3.04 v 2.04 hours at the other; P<0.001 for both comparisons). They had significantly fewer nights with no sleep, did better than controls on tests of vigilance in the morning, and were less sleepy during the day. The authors couldn’t tell if protected sleep helped interns make fewer mistakes. It had